memoir by
ASHLEY M. JOHNSON
I didn’t always have a southern accent. I gathered it gradually over time, as I suppose we do with most things. One wouldn’t think so now—and looking at me, I surely wouldn’t—but I am a native born midwestern girl. Born in Spring Valley, Illinois and raised in Wyanet, Illinois. A town so small it has one gas station and a hint of a library. So small that everyone knows everyone.
We’re like a big family; in the way where a lot of us get along…and a lot of us don’t. Growing up in such a town was a carefree life. I lived on the corner of West Main Street in a big old house that was once a funeral home. As a kid, I always told people my house was the one with a star on top: a large, yellow Christmas star hanging from the attic window on the outside year-round.
That house was more than a house. Yes, it was a collection of five bedrooms, three baths, an attic, basement, and the usual dining, living, and kitchen areas, but it was more than that to me and mine. It had a beautiful yard littered with my mother’s flower gardens, my sibling’s bikes and scooters, toys, and four different storage sheds my grandfather built from scratch. He nailed a horseshoe above the doorway when he finished the first one and said it was for good luck. I believed him. Grandpa was never wrong.
I can still hear the scream of his chainsaw in the early morning, still smell the spice of sawdust. If I close my eyes, I feel the coarse grain of it between my fingertips. I feel the cool concrete flooring in the newest garage beneath my bare feet, along with dirt and grass, and maybe even a bit of rotten apple sticking to my toes. The big apple tree in the front yard grew hundreds of apples, but it was diseased and always dropped the apples before they ever had a chance to grow bigger than my six-year-old fist. The green orbs rotted on the grassy carpet, and my sister and I were accustomed to the feeling of stomping on one.
We knew the gross feeling of the premature fruit crushed beneath our feet just as well as we knew the fireflies would never bite, no matter how many times we caught and released them, just as well as we knew each other’s breaths.
Sometimes I still don’t understand how I could go from that life to the one I led after we moved. Dad got hurt, and we ran out of money. So mom had to move us to Oklahoma. I hated being ripped away from everything I knew, and I spent the six years we lived there doing nothing but trying to find a way back home and acquiring a slight southern accent. I visited my childhood best friends every summer, but it was never enough. I wanted to come back to stay.
I missed my old life like a child does their favorite stuffed animal or blanket. I harbored a resentment so deep I could not understand it. I’m not sure I ever figured out a way to let it go. Logically, I knew it was not my parent’s fault we had to leave. I knew they did what they had to do to keep my sister and me safe. But emotionally, all I could see was that I was a stranger in a new world where I did not belong. I stuck out like a sore thumb. All the anger and sadness I couldn’t release became a storm within me—too big a storm for a teenager to hold. It was like being in the car with motion sickness and begging my mother to roll the windows down, except there was no end of the road trip, and even expanded to their max capacity, my lungs could not hold enough air to keep me afloat.
Eventually, I found a way back home. I moved in with my best friend and his mom—the woman I’ve always considered to be my bonus mom. It healed me in ways I had never thought possible.
Instead of covering my gaping wounds with Band-Aids, I finally felt safe enough to take the time to clean and wrap them tight.
The first step in cleaning out those wounds, of course,
was to visit my house.
It’s still there, and I still remember the first time I visited it when I first moved back. It’s a five-minute walk from where I live now to where I once did, from one life to the past, one version of myself to another. I kept my feet bare just for old time’s sake, even though it was late October. It would be wrong, somehow, to walk into my childhood with the soles of my feet covered. I needed to feel the earth beneath my feet. My feet were coated in black dirt and gunk by the time I arrived, and it was a comfort. Even as I stood before my home that had changed so much, I felt safe and secure.
My mother’s flower garden was long overgrown and neglected. They changed the stairs—a hideous new railing that didn’t match the rest of the house. It had brand new windows, but the doors were the same. I know because I could still pick out the two panes of plexiglass among the rest of the glass ones in the main door. My sister and I each put a hand through a windowpane one summer, and dad replaced them. I still bear a sewing-needle shaped scar on my right arm. The star on top was gone—and to me that might have been the hardest thing to see. Not the disheveled state of the house itself, but my yellow star being gone.
I stepped off the sidewalk covered in weeds and dirt, and into the front yard. I wasn’t supposed to, but this was Wyanet, and nobody cared.
Air in my lungs.
I was six years old again. I walked up to my grandfather’s biggest garage; the one with the concrete flooring. I saw him in his electric wheelchair carving loons and ducks from wood, using beads from friendship bracelet sets for eyes. I could have sworn I spotted my grandma’s lawn chair in my peripherals, by the steps. And maybe even a flash of her snow-white hair.
Another step: A rush into my blood.
All the tension melted from my shoulders, my face. It was like melting into the mold of the girl I had once been. I even felt the return of my dimples as I smiled so wide my cheeks began to ache. I stepped again and again, knowing the way to the backyard by heart—